Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a site, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may arise or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.