Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a given website through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This method is typically 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 website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.