Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular website using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our cloud web hosting come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall include the necessary code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to select the website that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be generated straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.