Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our web hosting and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.