Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a few images from your 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. As a result, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
It won't take more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, because all of our hosting include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function we offer. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you will simply have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.