Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given Internet site using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to include a few images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our cloud web hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and shall add the needed code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so 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 switch on the hotlink protection function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll simply have to choose the website that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.