Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared website hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll simply have to pick the website that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file will be generated directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.