Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

Because our cloud web hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will add the required code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will simply have to pick the site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.