Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will 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, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud 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 are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only need to select the site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.