Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.