Hotlinking is a term that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular Internet site by using direct links. In case you have site A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your website, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their website or they may simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load from your web hosting account. This approach is usually used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you want 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 sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.