Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, 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 enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The usual way to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the Internet site that you would like to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the required content in it. You could also use this function for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you can disable it with one mouse click via the very same section of your CP.