Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website 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 choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.