Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate 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 comes with all cloud website hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then click on the Delete button.