Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a given website through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet 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 shall load from your website hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in 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 website hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind 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 time, you can see all the websites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the typical method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only need to select the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.