Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. When you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load directly from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with a few clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to pick the website that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You can even use this function for just one folder instead of the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click through the same section of your CP.