Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud services and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should 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 personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we provide. While the common way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall simply have to select the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.