Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a given site by using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Because our shared website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will include the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the exact same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - return to the same section, check the box beside the given website and then click on the Delete button.