Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with several clicks. The standard way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to pick the Internet site which you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be enabled, you may deactivate it with a single click through the very same section of your Control Panel.