Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need 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'll simply have to go back to exactly the 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 others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will simply need to select the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be generated directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular website and to click on the Delete button.