Hotlinking Protection
What exactly is hotlink protection and exactly how does it work? When do you really need such?
Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should 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 Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all
hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection eventually, you could see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.