Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature we offer you. While the typical method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you shall only need to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.