Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - pick 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 in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites that are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the standard way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you will simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.