Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. 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 Cloud Web Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting service and the only 2 things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to go back to 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 do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to pick the Internet site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.