Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

As our Linux web hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only 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 will add the needed code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to choose the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.