Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Since our shared website hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will add the required code within it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an effective solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The common technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website which you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content inside it. You can even use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with just one mouse click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.