Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to come back to the exact 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 open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the typical method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.