Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll 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 will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to return to 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

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the conventional way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.