Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared web hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from showing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the necessary code within it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply need to select the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.