Hotlinking is an expression which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load from your hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web 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 Shared Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the websites that are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Our company offers an effective solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with just a few clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the site which you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content inside it. You can also use this option for just one folder instead of the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to disable it with just one click from the same section of your Control Panel.