Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting plans we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two simple steps - choose 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'll be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you could see all the sites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we provide. While the conventional technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.