Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an effective solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard technique to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to pick the website which you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content in it. You may also use this feature for only one folder instead of the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could deactivate it with a single click from the very same section of your CP.