Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of 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 another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is as simple - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.