Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also develop 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 one small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

As our cloud website hosting service provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall include the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.