Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the inclusion of images on a given site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than a few mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, as all of our hosting feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this feature only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the conventional method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you shall only have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.