Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function that we offer. While the conventional way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you will only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.