Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a given website via direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

As our Linux shared website hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - get back to the same section, check the box alongside the given site and then press the Delete button.