Hotlinking is a term that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It will not require more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, since all of our Linux shared website hosting packages come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this service only for a certain site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - return to the very same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.