Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within 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 shared website hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all of the sites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature that we offer. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you shall only need to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.