Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a few images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only have to choose the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.