Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a particular website by using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux web hosting service and the only 2 things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the typical method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you'll only need to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.