Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, since all our Linux hosting include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the conventional way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.