Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting plans provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will include the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - go back to the same section, check the box next to the specific website and then press the Delete button.