Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting packages we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you could see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.