Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about 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 Shared Website Hosting

Since our Linux shared website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will include the required code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply have to pick the site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.