Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account you use, as all of our Linux cloud plans feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the exact same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this function only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given 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 permission, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will simply need to pick the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.