Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

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 just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one 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 developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to activate the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the same section, check the box next to the given site and then press the Delete button.