Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given website using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to add a few images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Because our shared hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the needed code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only have to choose the site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.