Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.