Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load from your website hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud web hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

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 designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally easy - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.