Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular website by using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can 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 site A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other types of files too. 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 limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall include the necessary code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.