Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the standard method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.