Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared website hosting and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated 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 disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply have to choose the site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.