Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux cloud website hosting come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the required code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.