Hotlinking is an expression which represents the inclusion of images on a given website through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily secure 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 provided with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only have to pick the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.