Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux hosting packages and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to secure your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with several clicks. The conventional technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the website that you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You can also use this function for just one folder rather than the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you can deactivate it with one mouse click from the same section of your CP.