Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud services and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the common technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only need to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.