Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular site via direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they can 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. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd 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 Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The usual technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the site which you need to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content in it. You could also use this option for only one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with one click from the same exact section of your CP.