Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your web hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd 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 Shared Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the sites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the conventional method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.