Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared website hosting and the only two things which you will need 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 shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.