Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone 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. When you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.