Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also build 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 problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.