Hotlinking is a term which identifies the inclusion of images on a given website through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting plans and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.