Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud hosting and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to come back to exactly 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 open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we offer you. While the regular way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you will only have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.