Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux cloud website hosting plans feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the typical technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.