Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a given site through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, when a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you'd like 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 Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the websites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply need to pick the site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.