Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we provide. While the common technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.