Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will just need to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the required code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.