Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared website hosting plans we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.