Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. When you have website A, for example, and an individual 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 Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an effective solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The common way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the Internet site which you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content inside it. You can even use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with just one mouse click through the same section of your Control Panel.