Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether 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 choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.