Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a given site by using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you could easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.