Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Because our shared plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. In addition, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will include the required code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the exact same section, so that you can 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 us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.