Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in 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 do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the sites that are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only need to choose the site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.