Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting 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 Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud service and the only two things which you will need to pick 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 shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to come back to exactly 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 start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we provide. While the standard technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to select the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.