Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The standard way to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to select the Internet site that you need to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content in it. You can also use this feature for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with a single mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.