Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be created straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.