Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our hosting plans feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from showing on third-party websites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the required code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will only have to select the Internet site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.