Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person could also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
Because our Linux cloud website hosting packages come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you don't have much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall add the required code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the particular website and then press the Delete button.