Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a given site using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.