Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply place links on their 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, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific website and then press the Delete button.