Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your site, they could 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. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main 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 want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press 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 approval, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we offer. While the common technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.