Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared web hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature which we offer you. While the standard technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can perform this automatically and you shall only need to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.