Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site by using direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and someone creates site B and wants to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types 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 are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.