Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a given site by using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Because our shared website hosting feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will include the necessary code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in 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 our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.