Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

As our Linux website hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from showing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall add the necessary code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with a simple solution to secure your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several clicks. The conventional way for you to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the website that you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the essential content within it. You may also use this feature for only one folder rather than the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with a single mouse click through the very same section of your Control Panel.