Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function we provide. While the regular way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you'll only have to select the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.