Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the conventional technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can do this automatically and you will only have to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.