Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a particular website by using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we offer you. While the common method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you shall only need to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.