Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only need to select the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.