Hotlinking is a term which refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.