Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is a way of 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 also provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just 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 Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the common way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you'll only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.