Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting plans feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will add the needed code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - go back to the same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.