Hotlinking is a term which describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It will not take more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature that we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, as all our Linux hosting service come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this feature only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only need to select the site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.