Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a given website by using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other types of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting plans we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites that are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature which we offer. While the regular method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.