Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with a few clicks. The standard technique to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the Internet site that you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You may also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be enabled, you may disable it with one click through the same exact section of your CP.