Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud website hosting packages and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

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 can use the security tool we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.