Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a method for 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 furthermore provide a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.