Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

As our Linux shared website hosting packages feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will 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 in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only need to select the site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.