Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a given Internet site using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux hosting and the only two things which 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 shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open 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 protection feature which we provide. While the conventional method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.