Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a given site via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security function that we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, since all our Linux hosting packages include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this service only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only have to pick the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.