Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site that you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content within it. You can even use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you could disable it with just one click through the very same section of your CP.