Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud website hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all the sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel 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 are not quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you want to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content within it. You can even use this function for just one folder rather than the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you can deactivate it with just one click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.