Hotlinking is a term which identifies the inclusion of images on a given website via direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other kinds 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 are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you can see all the sites which are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.
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 will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the common way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.