Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our Linux hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the standard technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.