Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a given website through direct links. If you have site A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they may simply place links on their 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 directly from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given site and then press the Delete button.