Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes 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 hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink security function that we provide even if this is the first hosting account which you use, as all our Linux shared web hosting packages feature a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this function only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only need to choose the website which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.