Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared hosting plans include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield 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 Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you could also pick 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, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the required code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the exact same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've 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 site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular website and then press the Delete button.