Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Since our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will add the required code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to select the website which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.