Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Because our Linux shared plans feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the required code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer an uncomplicated solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the website that you intend to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You can even use this function for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you may deactivate it with just one click from the same section of your CP.