Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only need to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.