Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will 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, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared web hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall include the required code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you could disable this service for any 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 that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to activate the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as easy - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.