Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the sites which are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only need to choose the site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.