Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites that are protected in the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.