Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real visitors, as 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 files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you could see all of the sites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to secure your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional way to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to pick the site that you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You can also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you can deactivate it with one click from the same section of your CP.