Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates website B and wants to add a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish 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 ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we provide. While the standard method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you'll only need to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.