Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud hosting services and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives in it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the site that you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content within it. You could also use this feature for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.