Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our shared hosting packages and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.