Hotlinking is a term which represents the addition of images on a given site by using direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This method is sometimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.