Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, 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 can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared plans come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and shall add the required code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the common method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you shall only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.