Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website 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 website A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.