Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard way to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the site that you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you can disable it with just one mouse click from the very same section of your CP.