Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't require more than several clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, because all our Linux cloud hosting come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this function only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to choose the website that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be created straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.