Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts 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'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
Because our hosting services come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you may also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will include the needed code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the very same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only need to pick the site that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.