Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all the sites that are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the typical way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.