Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function we offer you. While the standard way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you'll only need to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.