Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

As our cloud website hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the required code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to select the website that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.