Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our Linux cloud web hosting service include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular website and to click on the Delete button.