Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux cloud hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the needed code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - return to the very same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.