Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

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