Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll have to choose 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 shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature we provide. While the typical technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only have to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.