Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared web hosting and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.