Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. If you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, because the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you'd like 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 Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site that you want to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content inside it. You could also use this option for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with just one click via the same section of your Control Panel.