Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens Internet 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 approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers a simple solution to shield your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with a few mouse clicks. The conventional way to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website which you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You can even use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with just one click via the same exact section of your CP.