Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want 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 sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your approval, you could easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to select the Internet site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.