Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all the sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the standard method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall only have to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.