Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which could develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.