Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes 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 could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you could see all of the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to choose the site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be set up straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.