Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts 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 ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't take more than a few clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, because all our Linux cloud packages feature a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only need to pick the website which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.