Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.