Hotlinking is a term that refers to the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Consequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images shall load from your website hosting account. This method is typically used for documents and other kinds of files as well. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their websites.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.