Hotlinking is a term that describes the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site using direct links. When you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to add a couple of images from your site, they can either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, because the images will load directly from your hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other sorts of files also. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web 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 Website Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to select 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 deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.