Hotlinking is an expression that describes the inclusion of images on a particular website via direct links. When you have website A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a number of images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they could simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, every time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images shall load from your web hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a method for preventing 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 give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared plans and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.