Hotlinking is a term that identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your website hosting account. This method is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.