Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared web hosting plans and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.