Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only need to choose the site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.