Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which may arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same 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 Web Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.