Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the conventional technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.