Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on 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 consent, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only have to choose the site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.