Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick 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 won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the typical technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you'll only need to choose the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no 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 through the exact same section.