Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
As our hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will include the required code within it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in the very same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then press the Delete button.