Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Since our website hosting plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the necessary code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function that we offer. While the typical method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you'll only need to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.