Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.