Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all of the sites which are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The common way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the website which you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content in it. You could also use this option for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with just one mouse click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.