Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you could see all of the websites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to pick the website that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.