Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also build 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 a small personal website, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting plans feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the common technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.