Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.