Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create 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 supplied with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the websites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with just a few clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you need to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content inside it. You could also use this function for just one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with a single click from the exact same section of your CP.