Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared 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 shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to shield your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the Internet site which you want to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content inside it. You could also use this function for just one folder instead of the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you can disable it with a single mouse click from the same exact section of your Control Panel.