Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding 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 Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you can see all the websites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer an uncomplicated solution to secure your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with several clicks. The common way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the website which you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You may also use this function for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be enabled, you could disable it with just one click via the same exact section of your CP.