Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a given site using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all web hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you can see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the typical method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you shall only have to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.