Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to return to exactly 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 do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only have to pick the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.