Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet 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 from your web hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our shared plans and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature which we offer. While the common technique of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you shall only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.