Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since 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 via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared hosting service and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to come back 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 an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the site that you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content within it. You could also use this function for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may disable it with just one mouse click through the exact same section of your CP.