Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else can 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 big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our shared hosting plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall add the required code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - go back to the same section, check the box beside the given site and then click on the Delete button.