Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting plans we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.