Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the Internet site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content within it. You may also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with one mouse click via the very same section of your Control Panel.