Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a given website through direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This approach 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 hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud web hosting services and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.