Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given website using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.