Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux shared web hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will add the required code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the specific website and then click on the Delete button.