Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website through direct links. When you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a number of images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, as the images will load directly from your website hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.