Hotlinking Protection
What is hotlink protection and how does it work? When do you really need it?
Hotlinking is an expression that describes the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they could 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. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated 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 wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.