Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a given website using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

As our Linux website hosting packages include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.