Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could 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 protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate 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 supplied with all hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in 2 basic 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 in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.