Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, because 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 simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account you use, due to the fact that all our Linux cloud website hosting service feature a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to select the site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.