Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes 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 hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, since all of our Linux cloud packages include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the exact same easy-to-use point & 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 would like to switch on this feature only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the typical technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.