Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a site 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 site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Because our Linux website hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the needed code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for each 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 authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll simply need to choose the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.