Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your hosting account. This method is oftentimes 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 can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all hosting packages we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with just a few clicks. The usual approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to pick the Internet site that you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content inside it. You could also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you could deactivate it with one mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.