Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function we provide. While the standard method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you will simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.