Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all website hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you can see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.