Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It will not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, due to the fact that all our Linux hosting feature a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to choose the website that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.