Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is 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 shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you shall only need to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.