Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given website through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This technique 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 website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature that we offer. While the common technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only need to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.