Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily shield 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 supplied with all cloud web hosting packages we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you'll only need to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.