Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a couple 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 Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally easy - return to the exact same section, check the box next to the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.