Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.