Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to include a couple of images from your site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other types of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any coding skills 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 turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.