Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion of images on a given site by using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The usual way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the website that you need to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You can even use this option for just one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could deactivate it with a single click through the same section of your Control Panel.