Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our cloud web hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the needed code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as easy - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.