Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load directly from your hosting account. This process is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd 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 Website Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create 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 comes with all website hosting packages we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to select the Internet site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the particular site and to click on the Delete button.

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