Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, as all our Linux shared hosting include a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.