Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - go back to the same section, check the box next to the given website and then click on the Delete button.