Hotlinking is an expression which represents the inclusion of images on a particular site using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in 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, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then click on the Delete button.