Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.