Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It will not take more than several mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, since all our Linux shared web hosting services feature a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the exact same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this feature only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to choose the site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.