Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Since our Linux shared hosting plans provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only two mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you may also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the necessary code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to select the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be generated directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.