Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a couple of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you are able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.