Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing 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 furthermore offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud hosting plans and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer. While the regular way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.