Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given website by using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to select the website that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.