Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as 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 within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting plans we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to select the site that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.