Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We offer an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the site that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content within it. You can also use this function for only one folder rather than the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with a single mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.