Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, each time 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 approach is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files as well. 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 ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website 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 wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the very same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then press the Delete button.