Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you could see all of the websites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to select the site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be created straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.