Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our website hosting plans and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to come back 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 provide a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with several clicks. The standard technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to select the site that you want to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content inside it. You can even use this function for just one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could disable it with a single click through the same section of your CP.