Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of generating an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll only have to select the Internet site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be created directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.