Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply place 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 Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only two things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.