Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a given site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites which are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given website and then click on the Delete button.