Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all hosting plans we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific website and then press the Delete button.