Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also create a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding 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 Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you can see all of the sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual way for you to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool that you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You may also use this feature for just one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with a single click from the exact same section of your CP.