Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links directly to your website. In this way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.