Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared plans and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.