Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the conventional way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you will only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without difficulties even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.