Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site via direct links. If you have website A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our website hosting plans and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The usual way to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the Internet site that you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content in it. You can even use this option for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click through the exact same section of your CP.