Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. If you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting plans 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 Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside 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 included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then press the Delete button.