Hotlinking is a term that describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for example, and a person creates site B and wishes to add a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as simple - go back to the same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.