Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.