Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your website. In this way, every time 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 may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up 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 supplied with all shared web hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you can see all the websites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.