Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer a simple solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The conventional technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to pick the website that you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content within it. You can also use this function for only one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you can disable it with one mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.