Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your Internet site, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load straight from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files too. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.