Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular website by using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their site 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 from your web hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd 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 create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Our company offers a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard way to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the Internet site which you want to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for only one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with a single click through the exact same section of your CP.