Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.