Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to 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, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select 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 disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.