Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with a few clicks. The conventional way to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the website which you want to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content inside it. You may also use this option for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you can deactivate it with one mouse click via the very same section of your Control Panel.