Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a given site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will only have to select the site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be created directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.