Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a given site through the use of direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time 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 web hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd 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

It will not require more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account which you use, as all of our hosting plans come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.