Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about 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 Web Hosting

Since our Linux web hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the necessary code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.