Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a given site using direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website 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'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It will not take more than several clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, as all our website hosting include a very simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an effective solution to protect your content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The common way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the Internet site that you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You could also use this option for only one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you can disable it with just one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.