Hotlinking is an expression which describes the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wants to include a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put 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 Internet site A, because the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to 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 may use the security tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the given website and then click on the Delete button.