Hotlinking is a term which describes the inclusion of images on a particular site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It won't take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function we provide even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, because all our Linux cloud web hosting packages come with a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this service only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.