Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you'll only need to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.