Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud packages and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with just a few clicks. The conventional approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site that you need to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content inside it. You can even use this option for only one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one mouse click from the same section of your CP.