Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to pick 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 shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The common technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to choose the site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You can even use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with just one click via the very same section of your CP.