Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites that are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to the same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.