Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package 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 site. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid 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 furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as easy - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.