Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting plans we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a few clicks. The conventional technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content inside it. You may also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be enabled, you could disable it with just one mouse click through the exact same section of your CP.