Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply need to choose the site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.