Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your web hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own 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 Shared Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared hosting plans and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the Internet site which you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content inside it. You may also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with just one mouse click through the same section of your Control Panel.