Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.