Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular website using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the sites which are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the typical way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall only have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.