Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The usual approach to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to pick the Internet site which you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content in it. You may also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may deactivate it with one click from the exact same section of your CP.