Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and a person creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The conventional technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the Internet site which you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content within it. You could also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you may disable it with a single mouse click through the same section of your Control Panel.