Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a given site via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple 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 in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as easy - get back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.