Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all website hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you could see all of the websites that are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to choose the website that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.