Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

As our Linux cloud hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will include the required code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with an effective solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with a couple of clicks. The conventional approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which you want to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content within it. You can also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you can deactivate it with a single mouse click via the very same section of your CP.