Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular site using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only need to pick the site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.