Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given site via direct links. If you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we provide. While the common way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you will simply have to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.