Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given website via direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.