Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.