Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your hosting account. This method is usually 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 web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud plans and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to shield your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a few clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site which you would like to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content in it. You can even use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to disable it with a single click via the same exact section of your CP.