Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also build 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 major issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within 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 supplied with all website hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The usual technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the Internet site which you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you could deactivate it with one click from the very same section of your Control Panel.