Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given website via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of generating an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to pick the website which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.