Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a given site through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load from your hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer. While the standard way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.