Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.