Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
Since our shared website hosting plans include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the necessary code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the regular way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.