Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.