Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a given site by using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types 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'll be able to limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared web hosting come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only need to pick the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.