Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to revisit the exact 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 don't want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.