Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to come back to 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 have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the particular site and then press the Delete button.