Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the websites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the standard way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can execute this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.