Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside 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 websites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to pick the site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.