Hotlinking is an expression which represents the inclusion of images on a given website by using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

As our shared website hosting come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will include the needed code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to pick the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.