Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with just a few clicks. The standard way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to pick the website that you would like to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content inside it. You could also use this option for only one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with a single click through the exact same section of your CP.