Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular site through direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to include a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our website hosting include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will add the needed code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - return to the same section, check the box beside the given website and then click on the Delete button.