Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a given site via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is oftentimes 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 hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you will have 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 shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to pick the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be generated directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.