Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, as all our hosting plans include a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the typical technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you will simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.