Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. 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 types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud web hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose 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 capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the sites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If required, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.