Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given site through direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
Due to the fact that our cloud services come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will include the required code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to choose the site that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.