Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud website hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two easy steps - select 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 inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you could see all of the websites that are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.