Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the websites which are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

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 have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the particular site and then press the Delete button.