Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud website hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply need to pick the site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.