Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all of the sites that are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the typical way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only need to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.