Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting packages and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the common method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only have to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.