Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the websites which are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only need to pick the Internet site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.