Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The common technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site which you would like to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content within it. You could also use this function for only one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you could deactivate it with a single mouse click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.