Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can appear or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.