Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
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 do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish 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 Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We offer a simple solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The common approach to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the site which you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content in it. You could also use this option for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you could disable it with just one click via the same exact section of your CP.