Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a given site through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to include a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of 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 somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we provide. While the standard technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you will only have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.