Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux hosting service and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.