Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting plans we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.