Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given website via direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody 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 Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer. While the conventional method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you'll only have to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.