Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with a few clicks. The conventional way to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the website which you would like to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content inside it. You can also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with just one click via the same exact section of your CP.