Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types 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 in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all the Internet sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will simply need to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.