Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web 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 offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.