Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a particular site via direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud 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 don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.