Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to add a few images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our Linux cloud web hosting service feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the necessary code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the very same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the standard way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you shall simply have to select the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.