Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a given website through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third 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 Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared web hosting service and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.