Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given site via direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the websites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll only have to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.