Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another person 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 major issue if you have a small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - get back to the very same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.