Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared web hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - return to the same section, check the box beside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.