Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.