Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting plans feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.

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 should use the security tool that we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.