Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our hosting plans provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the necessary code within it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a click.

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 should use the protection tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then press the Delete button.