Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as simple - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.