Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.