Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to include a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their Internet 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, as the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

As our shared website hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the needed code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only need to choose the website that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.