Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as easy - get back to the same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.