Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a given site through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you would like to prevent third 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 Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all website hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with a few clicks. The common approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the site which you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with one mouse click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.