Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular website by using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using 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 will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content within it. You can even use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you can deactivate it with a single mouse click via the exact same section of your CP.