Hotlinking Protection

What's the aim of hotlink protection? How does it function and in which cases is it helpful to activate it?

Hotlinking is a term that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to add a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

: Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding 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 additionally provide a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared hosting service and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.; Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.