Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to pick the website which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.