Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is usually 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 hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the websites which are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the regular way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.