Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid 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 easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the site which you want to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content within it. You can also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with just one mouse click through the very same section of your Control Panel.