Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website 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 wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to come back 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 start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we provide. While the standard way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you will only need to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.