Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a given website by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes 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 website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all website hosting packages we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because 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 Internet sites which are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the typical method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.