Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create 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 website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply need to pick the Internet site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.