Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Since our Linux website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to select the website which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the particular website and to click on the Delete button.