Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the websites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel 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 created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - return to the same section, check the box alongside the given website and then click on the Delete button.