Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in 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 provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our web hosting plans and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should 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 personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.