Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition 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 add a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.