Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a particular website by using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. 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 capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the common way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.