Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites that are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we offer you. While the typical method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.