Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Due to the fact that our hosting packages provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the necessary code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer a simple solution to protect your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with a couple of clicks. The conventional approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the Internet site which you would like to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content inside it. You can also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may deactivate it with one mouse click through the same exact section of your CP.