Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given site via direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer a simple solution to secure your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The standard technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the website which you want to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content within it. You can even use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you can disable it with just one mouse click via the same section of your CP.