Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a method for 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 give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will simply have to pick the site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.