Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux web hosting and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - go back to the same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.