Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the websites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you'll also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as easy - go back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.