Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to select the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.