Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given site through direct links. If you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a few images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to choose 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 will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the conventional method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you shall only have to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.