Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared web hosting plans and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website 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 decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The conventional way to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which you would like to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content in it. You could also use this function for just one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may disable it with a single click via the same exact section of your CP.