Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting packages we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only need to choose the Internet site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.