Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a particular site by using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants 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 can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes 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 website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

As our web hosting packages provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will include the necessary code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function that we provide. While the common way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.