Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate 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 files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud plans and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs 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 by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the common technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you will only have to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.