Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Due to the fact that our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will add the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer an uncomplicated solution to shield your content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the website that you need to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content inside it. You may also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you may deactivate it with one mouse click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.