Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we provide. While the typical way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.