Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate website 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 simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the websites which are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you will simply have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.