Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud website hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function we provide. While the common method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you shall only have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.