Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
Since our hosting plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. In addition, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall include the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you can disable this service for each 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 somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.