Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our Linux cloud web hosting come with a simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to choose the site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.