Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual way to enable server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the website which you want to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content in it. You can also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with a single mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.