Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a given website through direct links. When you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wants to add a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place 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 straight from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other types 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'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you could easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.