Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wants to add a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the websites which are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the conventional way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you shall only have to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.