Hotlinking is a term that represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a few images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
Since our Linux hosting include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will include the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.