Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only two things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the typical way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.