Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a given website via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.