Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a website 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 shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the common way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you'll only have to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.