Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside 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 cloud website hosting plans we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the websites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a few clicks. The standard technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to pick the site that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You can also use this feature for just one folder rather than the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to disable it with one mouse click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.