Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone 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 real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud services and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to pick the site which you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content inside it. You could also use this option for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you can deactivate it with one click via the same section of your Control Panel.