Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our Linux shared hosting service feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that 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, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will include the needed code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the typical technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.