Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.