Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the standard way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you shall only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.