Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our shared hosting services feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the needed code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.