Hotlinking is a term that describes the addition of images on a given site through the use of direct links. When you have website A, for example, and someone creates website B and wants to include a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply put links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, because the images shall load from your website hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux web hosting and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated 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 by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.