Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as simple - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.