Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.