Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud services and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.