Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the common method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will simply have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.