Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to add a few images from your website, 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. Subsequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than several clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, since all our Linux cloud packages include a simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same exact intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this feature only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you. While the typical way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you'll only need to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without problems even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through the same section.