Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a given website through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they can 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. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This method is sometimes 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 web hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Since our Linux website hosting plans include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given site and then press the Delete button.