Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, 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. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to go back 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 Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer. While the typical method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.