Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only need to select the website which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.