Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site 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, since the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

As our Linux cloud hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall add the necessary code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is as easy - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then press the Delete button.