Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will simply have to select the site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.