Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only 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 a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to choose the site which you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content inside it. You can also use this function for only one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you may deactivate it with just one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.