Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all of our shared hosting feature a simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this service only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to select the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.