Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a given website using direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given site and then press the Delete button.