Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a given site through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict 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 via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very time and effort saving 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 CP, provided with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the typical method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you'll only need to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.