Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux shared website hosting packages include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will include the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will simply need to pick the site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.