Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a given site using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number 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 site to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This technique is usually 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 website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our website hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - get back to the same section, check the box next to the particular site and then click on the Delete button.