Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the websites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The common way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the website which you would like to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content inside it. You could also use this function for just one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with just one click via the same section of your CP.