Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web 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 are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux web hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we offer. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you shall only have to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.