Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
Because our cloud hosting come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall include the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the regular technique of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you'll only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.