Hotlinking is an expression which describes the addition of images on a given website through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Since our Linux website hosting services come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the necessary code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.