Hotlinking is a term that represents the inclusion of images on a given site by using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a few 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 Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux web hosting services and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily activate the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to pick the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.