Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a number of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your website hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict 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 through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature we provide. While the typical technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you will only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.