Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as easy - return to the very same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.