Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud web hosting packages and the only two things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the conventional method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.