Hotlinking is an expression which describes the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the websites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we offer. While the standard method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.