Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a given website using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes 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 can restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only have to choose the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.