Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a limited 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 preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux cloud hosting plans include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend 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 once you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. In addition, you could also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will add the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the typical way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you'll only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.