Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux hosting service and the only 2 things which you will have 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 won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only need to choose the site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be set up straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.