Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.