Hotlinking is a term which identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wants to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images will load from your web hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd 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 sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all hosting plans we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the sites which are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink security function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.