Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the websites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll only have to choose the website which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.