Hotlinking, which is often 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, another person may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive 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 Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting plans and the only two things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to choose the Internet site which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.