Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting plans include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall include the necessary code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the very same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to choose the Internet site which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.