Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we provide. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall simply have to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even if you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.