Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a given site through direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the common technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.