Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because 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 documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - go back to the very same section, check the box alongside the specific website and then press the Delete button.