Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular website through direct links. When you have website A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the typical technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.