Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds 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 restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

As our Linux shared web hosting plans include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also select 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, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the exact same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.