Hotlinking is an expression that represents the addition of images on a particular Internet site via direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they're 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, since the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds 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 could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you can see all the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you shall only need to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.