Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the addition of images on a particular website by using direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your web hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers a simple solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the website which you want to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content in it. You can also use this function for just one folder instead of the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with just one mouse click via the very same section of your CP.