Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and rather than 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 Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared web hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function that we provide. While the typical method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you will simply have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.