Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only two things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We offer a simple solution to shield your content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The conventional approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the Internet site that you want to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You may also use this feature for just one folder rather than the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with one click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.