Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given site using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and an individual creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images shall load from your website hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you wish to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.