Hotlinking is an expression that identifies the addition of images on a given site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and a person creates website B and wants to add a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load from your hosting account. This approach is typically used for documents and other sorts of files too. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.