Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all the websites that are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.