Hotlinking, which is oftentimes 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 may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

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 if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the websites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will simply have to select the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.