Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you shall only have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.