Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the standard way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you shall simply have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.