Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud hosting and the only two things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - go back to the same section, check the box next to the particular site and then press the Delete button.