Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular website using direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with an effective solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The common way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content in it. You can even use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with one mouse click via the very same section of your Control Panel.