Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared website hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you can see all of the sites which are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular website and then click on the Delete button.