Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website by using direct links. In case you have website A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a couple of images from your website, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they may simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load from your hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.