Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink protection function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.