Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a 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 also offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The common way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to pick the website which you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content in it. You can also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with a single click via the exact same section of your CP.