Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, as 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 documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site which you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You can also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with a single click from the same exact section of your CP.