Hotlinking is an expression which describes the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. If you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts 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 can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the required code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.