Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to add a number 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 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 Internet site A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux website hosting and the only two things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only need to pick the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.