Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site 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 wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.