Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.