Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to include a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. 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 websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared website hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the common way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall only have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.