Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is 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 method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site 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 choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come 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 do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to select the site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose whether the .htaccess file will be generated directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.