Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.