Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux shared web hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature we offer you. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you shall simply have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.