Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular site by using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the standard technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you will only have to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.