Hotlinking is an expression which describes the addition of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load from your hosting account. This method is usually 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 hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our web hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of 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 should use the protection tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than 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 practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.