Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other kinds of files also. 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 sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud hosting and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to choose the site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.