Hotlinking is a term which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few 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 Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit 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 create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will only need to pick the site that should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.