Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you could see all of the sites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The standard way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to pick the website that you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content inside it. You may also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with a single mouse click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.