Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web 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 comes with all cloud web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to choose the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.