Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all of the Internet sites which are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.