Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may appear or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking 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 such situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.