Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux web hosting service and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just 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 Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we provide. While the typical technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.