Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared plans provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall include the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only need to choose the website which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.