Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, 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 could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud web hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.