Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web 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 should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to select the website that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.