Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud hosting and the only two things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.