Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There is a method for 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 easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our website hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated 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 by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to shield your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional way to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to select the Internet site which you want to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content within it. You could also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be active, you can deactivate it with just one mouse click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.