Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as effortless - get back to the same section, check the box alongside the given website and then press the Delete button.