Hotlinking is a term which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes 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 hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared web hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we provide. While the conventional technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only need to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.