Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website 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, since the images will load from your web hosting account. This technique is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files too. 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 sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the websites that are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.