Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within 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 shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud hosting and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
Our company offers an effective solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The conventional way to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to pick the site which you would like to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content inside it. You could also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with a single click via the very same section of your CP.