Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they may simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load from your hosting account. This process is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on 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 inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We offer an effective solution to shield your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The conventional approach to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content inside it. You can even use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you can disable it with one click through the same section of your CP.