Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

Because our Linux web hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will include the needed code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the particular site and then press the Delete button.