Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you will only have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.