Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to select the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.