Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular website and then press the Delete button.