Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a given site via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a few images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all web hosting plans we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then click on the Delete button.