Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting and the only two things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.