Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also create a site and as opposed to 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 a smaller personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function we provide. While the standard technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall only need to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.