Hotlinking is a term that represents the addition of images on a particular site using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our web hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with a few mouse clicks. The standard approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the Internet site which you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You can even use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with one mouse click through the very same section of your Control Panel.