Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they could 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. Thus, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
Since our Linux cloud hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and shall add the required code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply need to select the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be created directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.