Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The common technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the site that you would like to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You could also use this feature for only one folder instead of the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click from the same section of your CP.