Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud hosting service and the only two 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 will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need 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 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've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - get back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular site and then click on the Delete button.