Hotlinking is a term that describes the addition of images on a particular website through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for example, and someone creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, 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 website hosting account. This approach is usually 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 website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.