Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared website hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you can see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.