Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud hosting plans and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to come back to 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 somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as simple - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the given website and then press the Delete button.