Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to select the site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.