Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected in the exact 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 discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - go back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular site and then press the Delete button.