Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.