Hotlinking is an expression which represents the inclusion of images on a particular site through the use of 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 Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is sometimes 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 website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to protect your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The common approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you would like to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You can even use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you can deactivate it with a single mouse click via the exact same section of your CP.