Hotlinking Protection
Understand the reasoning behind the hotlink protection - how it operates and when to use it.
Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
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Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all
shared hosting plans we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
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Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a
semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the common way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.