Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared web hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the typical technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you'll simply have to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.