Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Because our Linux website hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will add the required code within it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in the exact same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to select the site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.