Hotlinking is a term that identifies the addition of images on a given site via direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may 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 website A, because the images shall load from your hosting account. This technique is typically used for documents and other types 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'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the websites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.