Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person could also build a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux hosting packages come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.