Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a given website through the use of direct links. If you have site A, for example, and a person creates website B and wishes to add a couple of images from your website, they could either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, when a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.