Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a given website via direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.