Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load from your web hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - choose 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 inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your approval, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to choose the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.