Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. 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 capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only have to select the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be generated straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.