Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is 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 user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting service and the only two 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 site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an effective solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The usual way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to choose the site that you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content inside it. You could also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you may disable it with just one mouse click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.