Hotlinking is a term which identifies the inclusion of images on a given website through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It won't take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, since all of our shared service feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a certain site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply need to pick the site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.