Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a given site via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd 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 Website Hosting
It shall not require more than a few mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, because all our shared website hosting plans come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the very same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only need to pick the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.