Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, 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 documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared web hosting packages 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 enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an uncomplicated solution to protect your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with several clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You can even use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you can disable it with one click through the very same section of your CP.