Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select 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 computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each 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 can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we offer. While the standard way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.