Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud website hosting plans and the only two things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the standard method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can execute this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.