Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a way of 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 also offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our website hosting and the only two things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to come 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 have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.