Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a particular site via direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.