Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all web hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all of the sites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the common way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you will only need to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.