Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Because our shared hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Additionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will include the required code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific website and then click on the Delete button.