Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term 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 which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links to your site. That way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your 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 this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared web hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you can see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.