Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of creating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only need to pick the website which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.