Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud website hosting services and the only two things that you will need to select 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 shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an uncomplicated solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with just a few clicks. The conventional technique to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site which you would like to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content inside it. You can also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with a single mouse click via the exact same section of your CP.