Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have 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

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll only need to select the website which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.