Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you can see all of the websites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.