Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to pick the Internet site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the particular site and to click on the Delete button.