Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

As our cloud hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall include the required code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.