Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a few images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding 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 furthermore give you a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site 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 wish to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer a simple solution to secure your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website that you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the required content within it. You may also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click from the same exact section of your Control Panel.