Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you could see all of the websites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

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 may use the protection tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.