Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared website hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet 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 want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.