Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux cloud hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will add the necessary code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only have to choose the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.