Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will 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, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared 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 need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given site and then click on the Delete button.