Hotlinking is an expression that represents the inclusion 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 few images from your website, 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. As a result, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load straight from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Since our shared web hosting plans come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the standard way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you shall only need to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.