Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a given Internet site using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Because our website hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the needed code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you can easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply have to select the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.