Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our hosting plans and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - return to the same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.