Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Because our shared hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the needed code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the exact same section, so you could 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 us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as 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 within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is as effortless - get back to the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.