Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a given site via direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared website hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open 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 activating the hotlink security function that we provide. While the conventional method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.