Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a given site through direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, when 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 process is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd 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 Web Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared web hosting services and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you may easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be created straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.