Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared web hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.