Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular site through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to include a few images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load straight from your hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the site which you want to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You can also use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.