Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Since our Linux website hosting packages feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the needed code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that 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 function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as simple - return to the very same section, check the box alongside the given website and then click on the Delete button.