Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may arise or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud web hosting and the only two things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.