Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That 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 too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure 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 hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the websites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with a few mouse clicks. The standard approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to select the Internet site that you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content inside it. You may also use this feature for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you can disable it with just one click through the very same section of your CP.