Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature we provide. While the common method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you will only have to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.