Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
Since our web hosting plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will add the needed code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide an effective solution to shield your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with several clicks. The common approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to pick the site that you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for just one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with a single mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.