Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.