Hotlinking is an expression which identifies the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wants to add a couple of images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they could simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load straight from your web hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you would like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could limit their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There is a way of preventing 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 additionally provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.