Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud website hosting services and the only 2 things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to revisit the exact 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 effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content in it. You can also use this option for only one folder instead of the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with one click via the very same section of your Control Panel.