Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, whenever a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared 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 are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable 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 hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick 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 by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.