Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our Linux hosting packages come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 clicks, even if you don't have much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall add the needed code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply need to choose the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.