Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
As our shared hosting come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.
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 can use the security tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - get back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.