Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to select 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 shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to revisit 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 others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink protection function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.