Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to revisit the exact 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 our company and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.