Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared packages feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will include the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.