Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your site. That way, whenever 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 issues that could develop or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared plans and the only two things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.