Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given site via direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to select the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.