Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can arise or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared web hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose 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 shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.