Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux web hosting and the only two things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only need to select the site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file will be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.