Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the inclusion of images on a given Internet site using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd 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 ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

As our Linux cloud hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will include the needed code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply need to choose the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.