Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a particular site via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all hosting packages we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to 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'll be able to take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the website that you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content within it. You can even use this function for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could disable it with just one mouse click from the exact same section of your CP.