Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function we offer. While the standard technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features 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'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.