Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
As our cloud website hosting plans include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the required code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.