Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a given website via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our 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 has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink protection function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to pick the website which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.