Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create 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 included with all shared web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the typical technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you'll only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.