Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about preserving 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 Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting packages we offer and could 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 website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we provide. While the typical way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you will only need to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the same section.