Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all web hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet 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 don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that's available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll only have to select the Internet site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.