Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting packages we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you could see all the websites which are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.