Hotlinking is an expression which represents the inclusion of images on a given website through the use of direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and an individual creates site B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, when a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images shall load straight from your website hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files also. If you'd like to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.