Hotlinking is a term that represents the inclusion of images on a given website through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.