Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of avoiding 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 will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.