Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared plans and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.